*First lines of “Epitaph on Interstate 80, Nevada,” The Curator of Silence, by Jude Nutter.

-Annette Gagliardi

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Annette Gagliardi is the winner of the NinaAlvarez.net Poem of the Month Contest, May 2018.

Annette has been writing poetry since the early 1980s and has been published in various magazines, area newspapers, and anthologies, and has won poetry awards. She visits elementary classrooms and shares poetry lessons, writing, and gives talks about her two children’s books. You can learn more about her at http://www.annettegagliardi.com

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Many thanks to all those who submitted your beautiful and transcendent work.

Bob Canuel is the winner of the NinaAlvarez.net Poem of the Month Contest, April 2018.

Bob Canuel is retired now but has been writing poetry since he was a teenager, a long time ago indeed. Over that time, he has accumulated a large collection of poems inspired by life, the universe and everything, to borrow a phrase from A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Married for over thirty years, and formerly residents of Ontario, he and his wife moved to Calgary, Alberta, in 2016, where they are both active in the writing and craft communities.

Bob has had work published by Wax Poetry and Art, The Prairie Journal, Dying with Dignity Canada and will soon see a short poem published at Right Hand Pointing. He also had two works published in the 1990s in small anthologies now out of print.

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Many thanks to all those who submitted your beautiful and transcendent work.

Aiyah Sibay is the winner of the NinaAlvarez.net Poem of the Month Contest, March 2018.

Aiyah Sibay is a poet and artist originally from Syria. She graduated from University of Maryland in the Spring of 2017 and has worked as a photographer, reporter, and columnist for various publications. She has also worked as a contributing writer for the UN and the Middle Eastern publication, Barakabits. She was a Litfest finalist and a winner of the “Writing Migration Literary Competition” at the Forming Black Britain Symposium.

Aiyah has also worked with Syrian, Iraqi, and Palestinian refugees over the years and is currently residing in the West Bank where she teaches English and writes.

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Many thanks to all those who submitted your beautiful and transcendent work.

They still slice brains at the Moscow Brain Institute
with the same hand-cranked deli meat-slicer,
which carves genius into thin memories
and past sins that could flutter to the floor
from careless fingers. Brains marinate
in formaldehyde inside flowered borscht pots
while history’s great minds rest in glass cases.

31,000 slivers of flesh mounted on glass,
stored behind three reinforced, alarmed
doors. 14 green leather-bound volumes,
embossed with five letters: L-E-N-I-N.
What used to be a state secret is no longer.

These books transcribe the territorial map
of Lenin’s brain: 31,000 snapshots
of each decision, good or bad, each strength,
each weakness exposed slice by slice.

Greatness comes with more of everything.
Most brains there get only two or three
thousand chances to prove themselves.
Rocket scientists, writers, secret police,
Lenin’s widow, and Stalin—the architecture
of their brain cells disassembled.

Poor Mayakovsky, your suicide celebrated
by a white labcoat who chopped through
your apartment walls with an ax, raced
away with your unusually large brain
in a washbasin straight to the slicer.

Lenin’s widow answered questions
about her husband’s personality,
to shine more light on science.
But the Bolsheviks changed her answers
to ensure greatness. His tenor voice
became baritone—no lovesick, romantic
lead role for him. Shaky vision
in one eye vanished.

In the end nothing could be discovered
by examining under a microscope
what makes a genius—or a dictator.

-Meg Freer

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Meg Freer is the winner of the NinaAlvarez.net Poem of the Month Contest, February 2018.

Meg Freer grew up in Montana and now lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario, where she teaches piano and enjoys running and photography. She began writing poetry recently, and her photos and poems have won awards both in North America and overseas and have been published in chapbook anthologies and in both print and online journals. In 2017 she won a fellowship and attended the Summer Literary Seminars in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.

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Many thanks to all those who submitted your beautiful and transcendent work.

We shelter from freezing winds
in sun-warmed nooks on the deck.
Indoors, the crew ladles
hot Dutch pea soup
hunked with ham into bowls.

To starboard, mountains march past
like a row of stout children
with waterfalls pinned to their jackets.
Their mountain neighbors, faces blackened
with gneiss, torsos girdled in mist,
wear witches’ hats on their peaks
as if hoping to frighten the children away.

As we watch icebergs calve
I think of the cow made of ice
in Norse myth who nourished
primeval Ymir with her milk.
The calves birthed today
are blue and translucent
as premature babies
who cannot survive.

The ice sheet, whitened
with bubbles of air in July,
deepens to aquamarine
in December. Eons ago,
glacial behemoths sheered
mountainsides slick; now,
as the icecap retreats,
its dirty fingers reach out,
grope the slopes, seeking water—
a panorama reflected, reversed,
in the blue-green glass mirror
of Prince Christian Sound.

Where one glacial digit
Dips down to the strait,
the ship pauses and rotates.
Each revolution’s a vista unveiled.
Only the clicking of cameras,
the chunk-chunk of idling engines.
Breathless and stilled,
we are seized by what Jack London
called the “white silence:”
time suspended in a caesura
of one billion years.

-Sharon Whitehill

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Sharon Whitehill is the co-winner of the NinaAlvarez.net + Cosmographia Books Poem of the Month Contest, January 2018. The other winner is Ari Gold’s poem “Fire Dancer.” The two created a lovely juxtaposition that put in me the mind of fire and ice, and that is why I broke tradition and chose two winners.

Happy New Year!

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Sharon Whitehill is a retired professor of English from Michigan, now living in Florida and attempting poetry for the first time.

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Many thanks to all those who submitted your beautiful and transcendent work.

My brother danced at last with explosions and fire—
Not a helicopter, just mushrooms at Burning Man.
I had Minha with me,
accidental lover,
former ballerina with a titanium knee,
a crescent scar on golden skin.
My brother had us,
temporary parents
so he shouted in triumph at the beauty of a bespectacled blonde dancer incoming from the skyscraper of flames.
My twin let loose at last.

Got burning ash in my fucking eye!
he screamed.
So much for bliss.
The carnival was now Hieronymus but I was not going
to allow
my hypochondriac brother
to chain himself to the wheel in the sky.

My gold and silver velvet robe flapped open,
sharp sand pierced my chest.
I was a king.
He was jealous when I bought my costume on Haight
As though I had stolen it from him.
A clump of soot, glowing orange,
somersaulted jerkily across the desert floor
A lizard on bad acid.
Minha placed her hand on the back of mine.
We should find a medic.

Had I really witnessed my twin at age six,
friendless in the playground riot,
friendless save for the pale-green puffy jacket
he clutched in his lap?
Or was it our mother who saw him there,
and told us later
how she’d burst into tears at the sight of one of her little boys
who didn’t know how to play?

Maybe it’s hard to lead another person to joy,

but here in the windy inferno,
I’d be damned if I didn’t try.
He’ll be fine, I said.
The crust of sand crackled under my boots.
My left palm gripped a ribbon that Minha gave me
a hundred minutes before.
Her hair whipped around her big soppy deer’s eyes.
Ethan moaned, on his knees,
convinced by the inferiority of his boring black robe
he was doomed to go blind.

Now inside the medic’s tent,
my brother being tended
I wait with Minha on folding chairs.
Another young lady punches herself in the forehead.
Neither the tattooed doctors scurrying around, stethoscopes flapping,
nor I, hairy knee trembling with fear for my brother’s eye,
know what to do about the weeping stranger.
“But
I
am
I was
a dancer,” the young lady cries
to the canvas ceiling
fluorescents revealing her despair
for all to see.
Party time over.
A tiny ballet shoe on the hard dirt beneath her folding chair.
A bone pressing out of her ankle skin.
Her joy is embalmed on her wrists–
a hundred multicolored bangles rise and fall with her tears.

Minha crosses the floor, kneels behind the girl.
Her hand on the stranger’s shoulder.
She whispers into her ear.
The girl softens
the cacophony of competing sound systems retreats
the plastic-and-tin folding chair holds me eighteen inches above the packed dirt.

A single sparkle that had once graced a cheek
calls to me from the floor
to tear my eyes from my queen’s caress of this stranger,
because as she whispers to the girl,

sweet milk pours over the other patients
in their soon-to-be-obsolete-again Victorian costumes
straight towards me.
Look away.
She is an accidental lover,
a girl from the midwest who I’m not supposed to fall in love with tonight.
So I tear my eyes from her,
to the tent door flapping open,
to the chaos of the night and a thousand other parties,
to the road like a long tall princess waiting to be fucked,
to a thousand restless flappings of my mother’s wings.

-Ari Gold

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Ari Gold is the co-winner of the NinaAlvarez.net + Cosmographia Books Poem of the Month Contest, January 2018. The other winner is Sharon Whitehall’s poem “Prince Christian Sound, Greenland.” The two created a lovely juxtaposition that put in me the mind of fire and ice, and that is why I broke tradition and chose two winners.

Happy New Year!

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Website: AriGoldFilms.com

Instagram: Instagram.com/AriGold

Twitter: Twitter.com/AriGold

Facebook: Facebook.com/AriGoldFilms

Ari Gold is a student-Oscar-winning writer and film director whose films are linked by musical and environmental themes. As a writer, his work has been serialized in the Serbian newspaper Danas, and he is completing both an adult novel and a middle-grade novel this year.

His new feature film, “The Song of Sway Lake,” has been selected as Opening Night Film at four films this month; he also directed the cult comedy “Adventures of Power” (“One of the funniest films in recent years” – NY Magazine), dozens of award-winning shorts and videos that have been presented everywhere from Sundance to Karlovy-Vary, and the short film “Helicopter” about his mother’s death in the helicopter crash that killed rock music promoter Bill Graham.

His most unusual distinctions include winning High Times Magazine’s “Stoner of the Year” award, and being enshrined in the Guinness Book of World Records for commanding the largest air-drum ensemble on earth. His next major project, currently in development, is a game-changing action-adventure fiction TV series about ecology, war, shamanism, and the liberation of the human spirit.

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Many thanks to all those who submitted your beautiful and transcendent work.